Blackberry growth is driven by teenagers and corporations

Businesses, teenagers and keen pricing are the key to BlackBerry's success

BlackBerry’s impressive new figures highlight that RIM’s smartphone has retained its admirable position at the top of the sales charts: the iPhone and Google Android might be capturing the headlines, but in fact it’s big corporations that are the key to major sales.

And those business users have effectively been advertising BlackBerry: that made the device’s spread to consumer markets almost inevitable, but the rise of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) among teenagers took even RIM by surprise.

The company maintains that younger users started to turn to BlackBerry because they wanted the best overall experience. While it’s unlikely that, really, many users thought web-browsing on any Blackberry was genuinely better than on an Android phone, or that the App Store was better than Apple’s, it is certainly true that BlackBerry found a decent compromise between price and performance.

In tandem with BBM, the BlackBerry proposition has therefore become irresistible to a big chunk of a whole generation: look at their updates on Facebook and it won’t be long before you see a BBM pin to connect for instant messaging.

The most important thing to learn from that is not that a single feature can ever be enough to guarantee success – but it’s surely true that the simplicity of BBM is what made it compelling. Even Google could learn something from that.